The lending industry has many different types of credit scores on the market today. Many different vendors have created them, such as Fair Isaac, the three national repositories, credit grantors, and insurance companies.

G. John Cento began his career as an attorney at the Indianapolis law firm of Katz & Korin, P.C., where he worked with Robert Schuckit. Trans Union was a client first of Schuckit, and then Katz & Korin when Schuckit joined the firm. Cento began representing Trans Union in 2001, and between 2003 and 2005 worked almost exclusively on Trans Union cases. Schuckit then left Katz & Korin in June 2005 to form his own law firm. Cento followed, but he stayed with Schuckit’s new firm for just a month.

A federal lawsuit has been filed against Experian in the United States District Court, Western District of Wisconsin, for merging the credit file of one individual with the credit file of another who share the same first and last name.

While applying for a mortgage, the plaintiff in the above mentioned case discovered that Experian had included no less than twenty-three (23) tradelines (bits of credit information) which did not belong to her on the credit report used to determine her credit worthiness. After being denied the loan, the plaintiff obtained her credit file from Experian. She then contacted an Experian representative by phone to dispute the inaccurate tradelines. The Experian representative confirmed that the tradelines in question belonged to another consumer and promised to have them removed from her credit file.

However, the information contained within the credit reports which Experian provided to the loan officer, is different than the information contained within the consumer report the plaintiff received when she requested her credit report from Experian. This is not uncommon. Rather it’s standard procedure.

Mixed credit reports are more common than you may realize. Your credit file may contain information belonging to someone else, and unless you look at your credit report, you may never know. Watch this short clip to learn more ...

Equifax is being sued for violated in Fair Credit Reporting Act

Earlier this year, Cento Law filed a complaint against Equifax for mixing the credit report of the plaintiff with information belonging to the plaintiff's father.

The plaintiff was first alerted to the mixed credit file when he was eighteen years old. At the time he was living at his parents and working. The alert came when he received a letter that was attached to his paycheck. The letter was from a county auditors office and its purpose was to inform the plaintiff that his wages were going to be garnished due to unpaid property taxes. Eventually the plaintiff learned that the property taxes in question were actually taxes levied against a man that he shared the same name with, his father.

As time went by, plaintiff was able to obtain a loan for a vehicle. He paid his loan on time with the hope of creating good credit. Two years later...

Inside the database of a credit reporting agency...

To know what a credit file is you must first understand what a database is and how it functions. A database is structured data that is accessible in a variety of ways. There are about a dozen different kinds of databases, and the credit reporting agencies use one of the most common types, a relational database. At the most basic level, a relational database is an electronic database that arranges information into one or more tables with a unique identifier for each row. In a credit reporting agency's database, each row represents a single consumer while each column contains bits of information attributed to the column header (such as Social Security number or date of birth).

The term "credit file" is often used interchangeably with "credit report", but in the credit reporting industry these terms are distinctly different. A credit file is a bit of raw data contained within a database. At any given time, the national consumer reporting agencies maintain hundreds of millions of consumer credit files in their databases. According to some estimates these files relate to approximately 250 million credit active consumers across the United States. This means that many consumers have more than one credit file in a consumer reporting agency's system.

A "credit report" is something that does not currently exist. A credit report is created at the moment that it is asked for. Your credit report might look different today than it will a month from now, and most certainly will look different than it did three months ago. ...